Gluten-Free Holiday: Christmas and Hanukkah Favorites- Chipolatas

Welcome to our Gluten-Free Holiday Celebration. I’m so glad you could visit.

A Gluten-Free Holiday is off to a wonderful start! Ricki at Diet, Dessert and Dogs kicked us off with tips to stay healthy during the holidays and shared some delicious truffles. Then, Shirley at Gluten-Free Easily shared a no-fail pie crust recipe and we linked our Thanksgiving favorites. Last week Alta from Tasty Eats at Home got us thinking about Gifts of Good Taste. She shared her Macadamia Almond Brittle and Pistachio Coconut Macaroons. Hopefully by now you are aware that each week there are tons of great cookbooks given away. Check out below and see which really amazing cookbook authors want to give you their books. Next week visit Carrie at Ginger Lemon Girl for Holiday Breakfasts and Brunch.

So far there have been 106 recipes shared with this event! I’d love to see that number hit 150 by Wednesday so please join in and let others know.

This week I’m honored to host your Favorite Christmas and Hanukkah Entrees and Side Dishes. Now I realize we just cleaned up from Thanksgiving, but Hanukkah has started and Christmas is only 23 days away. So now is the time to get planning and test cooking those dishes.

I’ve been playing with some new recipes that include favorites for Christmas from England. I’m so excited this year to be hosting a Boxing Day Celebration with some relatives from Lincolnshire. Tony has informed me that the best sausages come from Lincolnshire. Well since he can’t bring them with him, and they’re probably not gluten free, I’m working on my version of the favorite Chipolatas. I did find some resources for gluten free sausages in UK, The Black Farmer which sound great.

This version can be made two ways. You can either start with my PancettaSage Sausage recipe or use the one I’m sharing here. Now most of the recipes I’ve seen for sausage in the UK uses rusk or what we call bread crumbs. Not something I’m that keen on using even if it’s gluten free. So I don’t add that ingredient.

While researching chipolatas I found that for the holidays there are two key things to be added, sage and bacon.

So here is my US/VA version of the UK Chipolatas.

Ingredients:

1 pound fresh ground organic pork

1/2 tsp granulated onion

1/2 tsp thyme

1/2 tsp mace

1 tsp sea salt

1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper

2-3 TBS rubbed sage

1/2 cup very cold water

Fresh Sage leaves for each sausage link

Slice of bacon for each sausage link

Directions:

If you like to save money buy a Pork Butt and grind it yourself. If you don’t have a meat grinder attachment no problem, you can get ground pork at the market. You can also get the pork butt at the grocery and ask them to rough grind it once for you. One more reason to get to know your butcher.

Mix the remaining ingredients on the list down to the water into the pork. To make sure everything is combined really well after the initial mix, I toss it all into the food processor. Don’t over process it or you’ll have pork soup. If you pulse just enough to work the seasonings into all of the pork.

Now if you happen to get some sausage casings and have that attachment to your mixer than start making your sausage. I don’t have that attachement and prefer to roll my sausages by hand with no casings.

Because I do these by hand they will not look like the traditional long thin chipolatas but they taste great.

These are mild sausages so if you like to taste more of the seasonings double the amounts of seasonings called for in the recipe.

Now to cook these sausages for the holidays you’ll want to add a couple more items. Take each sausage and place a fresh sage leaf on top and then wrap the whole thing with a slice of bacon. Lay them on the cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Place into a 400 degree preheated oven and cook until the bacon is crisp which should be enough time for the sausages to cook too. This should take approximately 20 minutes. WARNING: Your house will smell amazing and will draw people from every room.

Now it’s your turn to share your favorite Christmas and Hanukkah Entrees and Side Dishes by using the link at the bottom of this post.

This contest is now closed. Thank you to all who participated. Please head over to Ginger Lemon Girl to see who won!

It’s also your turn to get a gift from one of these authors. They have graciously offered to give you a copy of their cookbook if your comment number is randomly selected. (only shipping in the US for non e-books) How do you get a number? Try this To Do List but don’t delay, it’s over on December 8th!

You can do any or all of the following things just leave a comment for each one:

- Link up your gluten-free entree or side dish recipe via the linky at the bottom of this post and leave a comment telling me what you’ve shared.

- Follow@thewholegang on Twitter and leave a comment here saying that you did.

- Post about this roundup on your blog or Facebook and leave me a comment here telling me you did.

- Subscribe to The W.H.O.L.E Gang in a reader or in email, and leave a comment here telling me you did.

- If by chance you have already read or purchased a copy of either book, leave an Amazonreview for the book and leave a comment here telling me you did.

- Tweet about this roundup using @thewholegang and our event hashtag, #GFHoliday and leave a comment here saying that you did.

Leave a comment each time you do something on this to do list. Don’t leave one comment with a list of things you did, that only gives you one number and one chance! One comment for each way you share this event.

Thanks for the mention! What a great idea for Celebration posts; I'll have to go and check out some of the other bloggers.

I can definitely recommend the Black Farmer sausages to those of your readers in the UK – which do come in chipolata form, as well as standard sizes. But most sausages here in the UK contain 'rusk', sadly. The list of ingredients should be very clear on this, and gluten free sausages will almost always say so very clearly.

I'm very impressed you decided to make sausages from scratch. And you're quite right: for Christmas, the sausages should definitely have bacon wrapped round them!

Nancy- you know homemade sausage is so dag on easy that I really see no reason not to make it. You'll know every ingredient and it tastes about 100 times better. Any fresh sausage you can think of you probably can make in about 10 minutes. A little longer if you're grinding your own meat.

Diane I love seeing what you come up with! Your recipes are always so creative! I linked up my recipe for gluten-free pie crust – veggie pot pie makes a great entree for vegetarians or vegans during the holidays! Thanks!

[…] Diane over at The W.H.O.L.E. Gang is hosting this week, and is sharing this amazing recipe for chipolatas. Seriously, they make my mouth water just looking at them. And of course, in our Gluten-Free […]